08/05/01
By ANDREW D. SMITH
Staff Writer
The Trenton Times
TRENTON The city's once bustling commercial district could blossom again if business owners and government officials are willing to do the work necessary to make it happen.
That's the opinion of Jon Schallert, an eminent business guru who toured Trenton twice last week and talked to dozens of business owners and state and city officials.
Trenton has "assets that other cities would kill for," he said.
Schallert was among many experts on downtown revivals who participated in a conference on the subject last week in Trenton.
The conference, called Downtown Revitalization Institute 2001, was sponsored by Main Street New Jersey, a state-funded agency that helps cities throughout New Jersey restore and maintain their downtowns by implementing a multipronged plan developed in the late 1970s.
The get-together drew around 50 people mostly government officials, business owners and volunteers from 13 towns, including Lawrence and the "Capital South" section of Trenton, who are active members of the Main Street program. Also attending were representatives from the additional 10 to 13 towns, like Flemington, that are working informally with Main Street.
Schallert, who topped the bill at the two-day program and stayed in Trenton for two days of extra consulting, is a nationally-known business consultant who spoke in more than 80 cities last year and worked on-site with more than 300 businesses.
Trenton, a city that is struggling to reinvent itself after the embers of its once-powerful industrial past have virtually died out, can get on the comeback trail with simple, inexpensive improvements such as street signs that point in the right direction plus a business community that stays open later, and a stronger effort to capitalize on the city's assets, experts said.
"Let's start with something small, like the signs," Schallert said. "They're terrible. If you're going south on Route 1, following signs for the Sovereign Bank Arena, the last one points you in the wrong direction. It's inexcusable."
"And if you're in the city, it's even worse," he continued. "I was trying to get from the downtown area to Route 1 North, and there weren't any signs leading me in the right direction. I had a map and directions and I still wound up circling the area for 20 minutes.
"Let me tell you, if you get someone to come in here from the suburbs to shop, and they can't find their way back to the highway, and they end up driving around lost for half an hour, they won't ever come to the city again. Ever. And that would be a shame, considering how easy the problem is to fix."
According to the experts, Trenton needs to take better advantage of its strengths, one of the greatest of which is its population.
The city has around 85,000 residents, most of whom would probably prefer to buy things close to home rather than going elsewhere.
In addition, approximately 20,000 state workers come into the city every weekday, and Schallert thinks they, too, would happily buy products here if there were good stores within walking distance of their offices.
Plus, the surrounding area is densely populated Mercer County has about 350,000 residents and, considering that Trenton is easy to get to, area residents would probably shop here as well, if there were more attractions worth coming in for.
Even economically struggling city residents can be a huge boon to retail businesses, says Donovan Rypkema, another expert who attended last week's two-day revitalization conference.
"The very poorest statistical households in the country those that earn less than $5,000 a year total still spend an average of $11,500 a year on goods and services," Rypkema said.
"They get help from relatives. They get welfare payments. They get all sorts of things. And what that means is, there's no such thing as a group of people who are too poor to help commercial retailers."
Rypkema is a real-estate consultant from Washington who spends much time teaching city and town officials Main Street's strategies for creating successful downtowns.
"Having people who work in a downtown area is great for retailers there, because each employee tends to spend between $2,500 and $3,500 per year in the city where he works," Rypkema said. "Having residents is even more important because they spend three to four times as much which is why people who redevelop downtown areas always want apartments over the shops."
"One way or the other," he continued, "you've got to have people if you are going to survive."
According to Schallert, Trenton's stock of attractions can also help its businesses if business owners do more to convince people who come for the attractions to stay in town and shop.
Among the draws he mentioned as important were Mercer County Waterfront Park, where the Trenton Thunder baseball team plays; Sovereign Bank Arena, which features hockey, basketball and a wide variety of special events; the War Memorial theater, which also hosts concerts and other shows; a museum; and several historical sites.
"Most cities two or three times the size don't have as much to see and do as Trenton does," Schallert said. "Those attractions entice a lot of people to come into town. If there were a good shopping corridor here, they would happily hang around a little longer and spend some money."
And several pending improvements should make things even better.
Schallert thinks the light rail line that will soon connect Trenton and Camden could entice more people to Trenton and could increase foot traffic from the train station to the state house.
"Studies have shown that increasing public transportation helps cities," agreed Jef Buehler, the state's assistant coordinator for the Main Street program. "I really do think the light rail line is going to bring more people into Trenton. And more importantly, I think it's going to get some people who currently drive to work here, park in a lot and walk directly to their office to explore the streets a little more."
Schallert said eliminating the Trenton Commons pedestrian mall on State Street and resuming the flow of through traffic will likewise increase the number of people who traverse Trenton's central business district and see the stores there.
That opinion is widely held by many government and civic officials.
"The plan to open State Street to through traffic next year is going to help things more," Buehler said.
"Pedestrian malls almost never work in this country and Trenton Commons is no exception. Having the street open again is going to encourage a lot more people to drive through the center of town and see all the businesses we have down here," Buehler said.
Another pending improvement that Schallert believes could really help the city is the Marriott hotel that is under construction right next to the War Memorial on Lafayette St. He thinks it will bring and keep affluent people right in the heart of the city's downtown business district.
"If merchants and city officials are clever, they are going to be able to leverage that hotel big-time," Schallert said. "They could use it as the core of their redevelopment efforts and grow out from there."
Schallert believes the city should concentrate first on making Warren Street, between State Street and the hotel, a vibrant commercial corridor. That means lining the street with retail businesses and moving service businesses, such as law firms, either to upper floors or to another neighborhood.
It also means creating first-class stores and restaurants that would lure people out of their hotel rooms at night.
Of course, in order to have nighttime customers, businesses must be open at night. The fact that many small businesses are closed in the evening and have short weekend hours is not taking advantage of the opportunity out there, Schallert says, because 70 percent of sales occur after 5 p.m. on weekdays and during the weekends.
"If your store is only open normal business hours, the only kind of customer who can buy from you is the unemployed," Schallert said. "And I think it's pretty clear why that isn't a good type of customer to rely upon."
Another thing that Trenton stores must do to attract customers is remove the metal gates most city merchants use when their stores are closed, he said. Such gates tell pedestrians that they are in a dangerous neighborhood and should leave.
"There are lots of businesses in this city that don't have gates, and my guess is that they don't get robbed all the time or even get too many broken windows or else they would have gates," Schallert said. "And even if removing the gates did result in a couple broken windows, merchants would still be better off because the number of customers they scare off with those things hurts them far more than the cost of fixing a couple busted windows."
Schallert isn't the only one to advocate the removal of such gates. The Trenton Downtown Association, a non-profit group that lives mostly off grants from government agencies, has been trying to get rid of the gates for years, says Executive Director David Schure.
"There are a lot of things you know you have to do if you want to revitalize the downtown, but sometimes it's hard to get merchants to go along with them," Schure said. "We've been trying for quite a while to get store owners to ditch those metal gates, but most of them just refuse. They think they'll get vandalized."
While metal security gates can be a troubling eyesore on the street level, vacancies or crumbling facades on the second story or higher up need attention also.
Ideally, Schallert said, those rooms should have tenants on upper floors, like law offices and other service businesses that don't need ground-floor store fronts to catch people's eyes and draw customers. Using upper floors like that packs more businesses into less space, increases the density of customers in the immediate area and makes all the businesses likely to succeed.
Other things that Trenton businesses need to work on, Schallert said, include improving exterior signs, cleaning areas in front of their stores and adding more attractive inventory. More marketing of their businesses would also help, he said.
By this, Schallert does not mean expensive advertising on television and radio, although he thinks that is important, too. He means grass-roots efforts to keep existing customers coming back and to encourage new customers to come through word of mouth.
For example, he recommends that business owners get a name and address for every person who walks into their store and then periodically mail those people things like information about new products. He also recommended giving existing customers rewards for every time they send a new customer into the store.
At least one city business owner plans to give some of those strategies a try.
"I've always known that it's much easier to get someone who's been in the shop once to come back than it is to get someone new into the shop. But I haven't always been as thorough as I should be about getting names and addresses. And I haven't been that aggressive about mailing to people whose names and addresses I have," said Martha Fischer Press, co-owner of the Rhinehart-Fischer Gallery, an art store and gift shop across the street from the War Memorial.
"Mailing out a mini-catalog every now and then is a terrific idea," she continued. "We have already sent out some postcards with pictures of newly-arrived work actually it's sort of nice to hear that you're doing something right but I think there's probably more we can do with that idea."
Although there are many challenges involved in reviving a deteriorating commercial district, Schallert believes that Trenton will likely succeed both because a number of groups are working to help merchants and because a number of cities that have already succeeded in making comebacks have shown other cities exactly what is necessary to succeed.
Places like Portland, Ore., San Antonio, San Diego and Indianapolis have gone from being virtual ghost towns to being thriving communities.
But, although he thinks that Trenton itself will likely prosper some day, Schallert thinks the group of businesses that eventually succeed may look very different from the group that currently operates in the city.
"There's probably going to be a big transition in Trenton over the next few years. Stores will have to offer good products in good surroundings in order to survive," Schallert said.
"The stores I saw that are run down and don't have the money for renovations and don't even have sellable products are probably going to fold. But there will be others to take their place, and in the long term it will probably be good for the city."
